Case Study: Te Herenga Waka – Victoria University of Wellington advances open science education with GitLab

GitLab advances open science education at Te Herenga Waka – Victoria University of Wellington

Te Herenga Waka – Victoria University of Wellington’s School of Engineering and Computer Science needed a single, compliant platform to replace a fragmented mix of Blackboard, wikis, Google Docs, Atlassian tools, and other systems. This complexity created extra administration, limited version control and collaboration, and made it harder for students and lecturers to work consistently across courses. GitLab Ultimate, especially GitLab Self-Managed, was chosen to provide one integrated solution for coursework and project management.

GitLab enabled the university to centralize teaching, submissions, and project tracking on a local instance with single sign-on and LDAP integration, supporting issues, boards, epics, milestones, merge requests, and CI/CD for both software and hardware projects. The results included stronger transparency, easier collaboration, and faster adoption across the school: student users grew by more than 483% since 2017, 34 GitLab-facilitated courses were added, and more than 2,000 groups now contribute to over 8,000 projects. GitLab also supported over 30,000 issues and nearly 15,000 merge requests, helping drive open science education and continuous learning.

Te Herenga Waka – Victoria University of Wellington

Simon McCallum

Senior Lecturer